G5 Doctoral dissertation (article)
Suomessa töissä : luokan, rodun ja sukupuolen intersektionaalisia kamppailuja (2024)

Mankki, L. (2024). Suomessa töissä : luokan, rodun ja sukupuolen intersektionaalisia kamppailuja [Doctoral dissertation]. Jyväskylän yliopisto. JYU Dissertations, 801. https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-86-0212-5

JYU authors or editors

Mankki, Laura

Publication details

All authors or editors: Mankki, Laura

eISBN: 978-952-86-0212-5

Journal or series: JYU Dissertations

eISSN: 2489-9003

Publication year: 2024

Number in series: 801

Number of pages in the book: 1 verkkoaineisto (123 sivua, 74 sivua useina numerointijaksoina, 4 numeroimatonta sivua)

Publisher: Jyväskylän yliopisto

Publication country: Finland

Publication language: Finnish

Persistent website address: https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-86-0212-5

Publication open access: Openly available

Publication channel open access: Open Access channel

Abstract

This gender studies dissertation explores the struggles that shape the lives of migrants who work in low-wage jobs in Finland and how class, race, and gender intersect in these struggles. Struggle is understood broadly as a social activity through which the conditions for living are produced. Intersectionality refers to a theory that helps us to understand how different factors, such as class, race, gender, age, nationality, and religion, together influence how we are treated, classified, and encountered in society. In this study, I will look specifically at how class, race, and gender are understood as intertwined and intersecting processes. The interview data for this study are conducted with migrant workers from EU and non-EU/EEA countries between 2013 and 2016. These data consist of individual interviews, a group discussion and follow-up interviews. The dissertation consists of results from four independent articles and an extensive theoretical summary. The first article highlights how interviewees repeat and construct an ideal of good citizenship based on the traditional and prevailing moral norm of worker citizenship. The second article explores the forms of participation and agency that class and gender shape in relation to the trade union movement. The third article is methodological in nature. It analyses two different ways of conducting interviews and conceptualises how race and gender shape (small) actions and resistance in men’s lives. The fourth article explores how precarious, ambivalent, and temporary intimate infrastructures co-become in the midst of migration that co-construct, sustain and make liveable the lives of people who migrate to Finland. Building on the results of the articles in the summary, I construct four dimensions of intersectionality that show how class, gender, and race intersect and shape the work, lives, and struggles of the migrant workers. In doing so, I distinguish between rhetorical–representational, structural–institutional, micro-level and material dimensions of intersectionality. The research findings show that intersectional analysis 1) adds to our understanding of the reconfiguration of class orders, and 2) reveals that class is formed in a movement that simultaneously undergoes both diffusion and condensation. The dissertation argues that without a theory of intersectionality, the multiple positions of migrants in the transformation of class order in Finland remain unrecognised. The empirically informed results of the study also raise new questions for the theory of intersectionality.

Keywords: migrants; low income; social classes; races and breeds; gender; intersectionality; doctoral dissertations